All of my own machines (except the laptops) have a dedicated backup drive which performs a nightly differential.

This is convenient, and provides protection against most common types of data loss.

It provides no protection whatsoever against the most catastrophic causes of data loss, such as fire, flooding, burglary, the entire city being ravaged by a gigantic junk-food mascot, etc.

For this reason, my absolute most critical data is also stored in my DropBox account. In general, cloud-storage providers can afford to do a much more comprehensive job than I of redundant, multi-site data mirroring. One must balance privacy concerns against data security, of course. (eg: assume that every byte of data which you transmit across the internet to a cloud-storage provider is also being cc'ed to the FBI, all identity thieves everywhere, the Russian mafia, etc.

I'm with joe. I have a google storage account with 30someodd gigs and a 7.4gb dropbox account. I backup most stuff nightly to a raid drive in my basement. I backup a subset of that to dropbox and/or google drive constantly.

The benefit of the latter(s?) is that it is a true roaming storage system, available anywhere and everywhere I have a computer within minutes of saving.

The benefit of the latter(s?) is that it is a true roaming storage system, available anywhere and everywhere I have a computer within minutes of saving.

This was the big seller for me. I used to drive myself nuts keeping project data synchronized between my desktop at work, my laptop which I use when traveling, and my home PC which I commonly use on weekends. Dropbox provides the functionality that the big server at work never could- instant sync between all computers, with the ability to access previous revisions.

I was going to setup an old laptop as a RAID 1 server with Ubuntu server, but the software that comes with Synology products makes everything so easy it was worth the money. I'd probably pay $100 just to run their software on my old laptop, if they sold it that way.

Supposedly it's possible to set it up as a 'personal cloud' (a misnomer) so that I can access the contents from anywhere with an Internet connection, sync with my work computer etc., but I haven't tried it out.

The thing that makes Dropbox really cool, and I'm not sure if this is immediately obvious, is that the data is stored locally on all your PCs, and ALSO on the Dropbox system, which coordinates between all your PCs to make sure they all have the latest copy of everything.

So you can work offline (say, while on an airplane), and save to your laptop's local storage. Then as soon as you are connected to the net, the laptop automatically uploads the new revision to the server, which then pushes it to all your other machines, and also pushes down any files to your laptop that were updated while you were out of touch.

So it's great for collaborative projects between users- you can share individual subdirectories with varying privilege levels. This is extremely useful when I'm working on projects with other engineers.

The thing that makes Dropbox really cool, and I'm not sure if this is immediately obvious, is that the data is stored locally on all your PCs, and ALSO on the Dropbox system, which coordinates between all your PCs to make sure they all have the latest copy of everything.

So you can work offline (say, while on an airplane), and save to your laptop's local storage. Then as soon as you are connected to the net, the laptop automatically uploads the new revision to the server, which then pushes it to all your other machines, and also pushes down any files to your laptop that were updated while you were out of touch.

that is the most awesome thing about dropbox. And, if you keep at least once computer physically separate from you 'main' home machine, like at work, you have no less than 2 copies of your important **** if something terrible like a house burning or lightening strike nukes your home machine.

Data backup/redundancy never dreamed of 10 years ago meakes me feel

now...how to i deal with the 3 TB at the house that gets more and more painful to loose every day.....

I did the RAID thing for a while but then I found out about CrashPlan, it's cheaper than properly rotating drives in your RAIDs so now I keep a couple 2 TB drives in the home server that aren't mirrored and backup to CrashPlan. The nice thing about CrashPlan too is like DropBox you can sync local copies across an unlimited number of machines so you can use their cloud service as a total fail safe and then cheap out on discs for your local boxes and not care if something goes south. I pay $18/yr for unlimited storage and unlimited syncing between computers I own. It's not as friendly to access the cloud stuff as DropBox, but I like the fail safe option for so cheap.

That dude was being a *****. Grab that bitch by one horn, and use your other hand to punch it in the ******* face a few times. It'll get the point and go away. If not kick it in the side of the head a few times. **** off, ram. After that first hit on my bike I would have lost my cool and it would be in danger of being gutted.